Sacrifice of Fools (6 page)

‘So the killer has knocked over the Shian equivalent of Peter Robinson, or John Hume, or McIvor Kyle? Jesus fucking Christ. This is a bloody fucking mess. The Northern Ireland Office, Dublin and the bloody Outsiders are going to be sitting on me for a quick result.’

‘Serial killers never yield a quick result.’

‘I know this, Littlejohn. What worries me is the backlash when the news gets out. And it will. I saw that wanker Fitzhugh from the
Newsletter
out there sniffing around like a squaddie in a brothel, and I’m sure his mates from the
Telegraph
and the
Irish News
and the
Irish Times
are out there keeping him company. They put it out that it’s Outsiders killed with an Outsider weapon, and it’ll be bloody
Independence Day
and
War of the Worlds
combined by morning. Look, I’m taking a risk here, but I’m putting you on the pay-roll as Outsider adviser, whatever the fuck you call it.’

‘Try “Xenological Consultant”.’

‘If I could pronounce it. I need you to run interference for us, give interviews, go on the news, tell what you told us, that it’s biologically impossible for the killer to be an Outsider. Keep the peace while we look for the real boy. Right?’

‘How much?’

Willich rolls his eyes in the way that says,
there are five bodies being zipped into black butyl rubber bags in there, and a gentle dew of vaporized brain all over a late Victorian living room, and you are talking money?
But before these thoughts can make it to his throat Tracey Agnew comes in to tell him what she’s got from the Outsider outside. She wraps her coat close around her very bright exercise gear.

‘His name’s Ongserrang something or other. I can’t pronounce these Outsider names. He’s in from Iceland, on his
wanderjahr,
you know, travelling around. He’s eleven, could you believe it? He had an appointment here this evening; the Harridis were going to fix him up with a new Hold or something, find him a place to stay the night. He’s kind of worried that he doesn’t have anywhere to stay. He turns up at the allotted time, finds the outside door open, thinks nothing of it, goes in, finds the inner door open too, thinks, what a nice trusting welcoming place that they can leave their doors unlocked with humans around, and walks into that.’

‘Do you want me to talk to him?’ Littlejohn asks. ‘He might say more in his own language.’

Willich sighs. It’s a very dry, tired sigh, like a man makes who has seen far too much of what no one should have to see, and doesn’t want to have to see any more but the world isn’t kind that way.

‘We’ll get a statement off the poor bastard in the morning. Great welcome to Ulster this is. Find him a hotel, book him in, tell him we’ll pick him up in the morning. Eleven years old. Would you send your kids off on their travels at eleven? These people.’

Now it’s Ian Cochrane. He’s looking pleased. He’s looking like a man who’s cracked it.

‘Our boy Gillespie,’ he says. ‘I managed to open the computer and get his address. I checked with our database and surprise, surprise, Mr Andy Gillespie has form. Three years in the Maze for conspiracy to murder. Interesting case; he was the driver in a botched assassination on a drugs dealer over on the Newtownards Road. Mountpottinger had been tipped off, our lads were waiting for them. You might remember it, it was the one wee Skidoo McGann got knocked over; we put Big Maun Patterson in a wheelchair.’

‘This rings a bell. It was the day the Outsiders came, wasn’t it?’

‘Didn’t even rate a line in the news. But Big Maun Patterson was Divisional Commander, Third East Belfast Battalion UVF. Our Mr Gillespie has immaculate paramilitary connections.’

‘Gun-running?’

‘And they found out, and he silenced them and made it look like some Outsider feud. Except he doesn’t know enough about them to know that they can’t do a thing like that, according to our friend Mr Littlejohn here. You have to admit his timing’s, shall we say, intriguing? If not him, some UVF buddy of his. Contract killing.’

‘Down to the last kid,’ Willich says. ‘Jesus.’

‘It fits,’ Cochrane says. ‘Gillespie lives alone in a flat over on Eglantine Avenue, divorced from his wife shortly after he got out, two kids
—
wee girls; no evidence of any significant others. This is his first job since getting out. What was it you were saying, Dr Littlejohn? Single, unattached, human male, undersocialized, bit of a loner, on the edge of society? He’s got prime suspect written through like a stick of Portrush rock.’

Willich leans against the wall. He looks out at the rain. He does the sigh again.

‘Here’s what we do. Get the lads out door to door, find if anyone saw anything; there’s a bloody hotel across the street, someone must have noticed something. We go for the gun-running approach, it’s the best we’ve got so far; Andy Gillespie is our prime suspect. Littlejohn, you come with me up to the morgue; Barbara might need your expertise, I don’t think she’s ever done a post mortem on an Outsider. We’ll haul Gillespie up there with us, officially to make an identification, if he can make anything out of what’s left. Unofficially, he might let something slip. I’ll prepare a press statement; we do not, repeat, not mention the mutilation of the bodies. I want everyone to know that like they know their kids’ birthdays, all right? They don’t even whisper it in their partner’s ear in the throes of passion. Complete silence on the mutilations. Every fucking nut case from here to Timbuktu is going to come out of the woodwork claiming responsibility once the news goes out. Are we right? Cochrane, send Rosh, Agnew, Crawford, any CID you can lay your hands on, in. This is a bloody fucking mess.’

It’s not because he’s cold and wet and shocked numb that Andy Gillespie’s shivering. It’s this place, this morgue. This porcelain, these tiles; these cold cold reflections of himself, an infinite regress of pale ghosts. Everything clangs. Everything bangs. Everything echoes. And he doesn’t think he’ll ever get the stink of preservatives and cleaning fluids out of his sinuses.

The seats are bloody narrow and hard. Everything aspires to the condition of the slab here.

He knows they have suspicions about them. They’ll have checked him out. They’ll have opened up all his sins and failings and handed them round like a bad school report card amongst virgin aunts. Andy Gillespie; fucked up by thirty-five, well, that’s it. You get one shot and one shot only. Redemption? Change of life? New start? We don’t subscribe to those notions. Leopards, spots; mud, sticking; smoke, fire; those are the maxims we heed.

In his teenage years, when too many of his friends had become Christians for the same reason that other friends started smoking
—
peer pressure
—
he had been hauled along by some recent converts to a wee meeting. Teenage Christianity seemed to be about little else than hauling yourself from one wee meeting to another, presumably so you wouldn’t have any idle time for sinful things, like smoking. There had been a talk
—
he’d learned there always was a talk, and a lot of singing, and not much else
—
on the Will of God. The speaker had impressed Andy Gillespie, for he was that rarity in Christian meeting society: a man of genuine spiritual insight. Most people think of God’s will as a mountain, the speaker said; a big sharp ridge, like the side of the Matterhorn, and if you wander you will fall off and be lost, and it’s a constant struggle to stay on that sharp ridge against the gales and buffetings of the world. But God’s will is not like that at all. God’s will is a valley with many ways through it, and if you wander too wide the steepness of the way will take you back on to easier paths.

The valley and the mountain. Yeah. Andy Gillespie’s trying to live his life like a valley, following the flow down to the sea. Too many others are pushing up the side of the mountain, clinging to the sheer rocks, waiting for the slip and the big fall when the rope won’t hold them.

They think I did it. They think I blew their heads apart like a dropped egg, Muskravhat and Seyoura and Senkajou and little Seyamang and Vrenanka. They think I did that thing with the knife on their bodies. That bitch in the beige coat who didn’t say one word to me as she drove me up here; that thin bastard with the look that says
I know who you are, I know what you are,
that wee girl with the gym gear under her coat; that big DCI bastard who looks like a Russian president with a vodka problem; even Littlejohn, they’re waiting for that one little slip, and they’ll cut the rope.

They send the bitch in the beige coat for him.

‘Whenever you’re ready, Mr Gillespie.’

Someone has opened the big meat larders and slid them out; he’s glad of that, he doesn’t want to have to hear five sets of chromium runners squeak and clack to a halt.

‘All right?’ the pathologist woman asks. Gillespie nods. She pulls back the first sheet. Gillespie closes his eyes. It’s too close; there’s nowhere he can look away from what has been done. The dead Shian is thrusting its wounds in his face, like Jesus on a crucifix:
look at me, look at what they’ve done to me.

‘Can you identify it?’ the woman asks.

The DCI and his DS and Little Miss Reebok Shorts and Littlejohn are smiling to themselves. Gillespie fixes Littlejohn’s eye. He bends to the corpse’s hand, licks the palm.

‘Senkajou Harridi.’

You’re not looking so fucking pleased with yourselves now, are you?

The Work-out Queen’s expression says she might suddenly boke.

He goes to the second trolley, licks the second corpse’s palm.

‘Seyoura Harridi.’

He doesn’t need to identify the third, but he does it anyway.

‘Muskravhat Harridi.’

To the end, then. He goes to the first of the smaller mounds of white sheeting, pulls a spider-thin arm free, presses tongue to palm.

‘Vrenanka Harridi.’

And the last.

‘Seyamang Harridi.’

Little Miss Cycle Shorts is losing her weightwatcher’s dinner in the wash-hand basin by the door.

‘Take him down to the Pass,’ the big boozy DCI says, shaking with fury and outrage. ‘There’s things we want to know from you, chummy.’

There’s a leaking sprinkler in the corridor outside Interview Room number two. Andy Gillespie can clearly hear it through the heavy wooden door. If it doesn’t keep the sound of a drip out, what hope when they start in with the riot batons? ‘Romper Room’, they used to call it. That was the good old bad old days, though. They have Amnesty International breathing garlic and macrobiotic yoghurt down their collars now; they need subtler methods. Psychological methods. Like the drip drip drip drip drip of a leaking sprinkler on the floor. Chinese water torture. And in the chair across the table from you is Dr Robert Fucking Littlejohn, xenologist. Wanker.

At least the Romper Room was quick.

‘Interview with Andrew Gillespie commenced 00:15 Tuesday March the third, 2004. DS Roisin Dunbar in attendance, also Dr Robert Littlejohn in a consultancy role.’

Down go the buttons. On goes the red record light. Same as it ever was, Andy.

‘I haven’t had my cup of tea yet. I’m gagging.’

DS Roisin Dunbar sighs. She doesn’t do it very well. Gillespie thinks about telling her this, decides against it because she does genuinely look tired, greasy, creased. Her make-up is flaking.

‘Look, Mr Gillespie, I’ve got a kiddie, a wee six-month baby. I’d kind of like to get back home to see her some time tonight.’

‘I’ve two girls myself, Stacey and Talya. I’d show you their photographs except you’ve taken my wallet. I always fancied a boy, but you get what you get, what else can you do but be happy with them?’

‘Mr Gillespie, let’s go over this one more time. You state that you left the Welcome Centre at twenty past six.’

‘I remember the time was on the alarm system. There’ve been a lot of break-ins in the offices of University Street recently; I think it was a Crime Prevention Officer from here told us we should put the alarm on even if we’re leaving the place unattached for just a wee while.’

‘But the Harridis were upstairs.’

‘Yes. I was going back there later. They’d arranged a wee hooley because I’d helped a client of theirs in the magistrate’s court. It’ll be in the court records.’

‘That’s not in question. It’s what you said you did between leaving the centre and returning there at eight thirty.’

‘I’ve told you, I went to eat at the Denim Diner on Botanic Avenue. They’ll remember me, I made a fuss about the table. I had lasagne and chips, two pints of Harp, a wodge of banoffee and a coffee. Banoffee, coffee, heh? Then I bought two six-packs of Guinness from the offie at Botanic Station
—
the time is on the receipt
—
then I bought soluble aspirins from the Spar on the other side of the station, the all-nighter. I don’t have the receipt for that, should I have kept it? Then, because I was early, I took a longer way back and found you guys at the Welcome Centre. You know this. This is the fourth time I’ve told you it without any self-contradictions or holes in the story.’

‘But no alibi.’

‘Do I need one?’

‘Ongserrang Huskravidi, who arrived at the Centre for a seven-thirty appointment, found both the front door and the office door open. The alarm was switched off. How do you explain that?’

‘The bodies were in the office. Maybe they’d switched it off when they came downstairs.’

‘But the outside door, Mr Gillespie?’

‘But if I did it, which you think I did, Ms Dunbar, then why the fuck did I come back with twelve cans of Guinness and a bag of aspirins?’

‘Why indeed, Mr Gillespie?’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Can we have a proper police officer in here? Look, instead of trying to pin a multiple murder on me just because I’ve a bit of form and some dodgy friends in my last life, you should be using me to help you. Jesus God, there is some seriously sick fuck out there who has blown five Shian to pieces and cut them up, and you need all the help you can get because you don’t have the first clue about how to deal with Outsiders. Littlejohn here’s as much use as tits on a boar; you need someone who knows the language, who knows the people, who can work at street level. What you’re forgetting is, these weren’t just any old bunch of weird Sheenies; they gave me a chance, they trusted me, they were my friends, and I want whoever did it caught and fucked right up the ass.’